ficient
and very practical reason. If the colonial possessions of Germany had,
under the old practice, been divided among the victorious Powers and
been ceded to them directly in full sovereignty, Germany might justly
have asked that the value of such territorial cessions be applied on any
war indemnities to which the Powers were entitled. On the other hand,
the League of Nations in the distribution of mandates would presumably
do so in the interests of the inhabitants of the colonies and the
mandates would be accepted by the Powers as a duty and not to obtain new
possessions. Thus under the mandatory system Germany lost her
territorial assets, which might have greatly reduced her financial debt
to the Allies, while the latter obtained the German colonial possessions
without the loss of any of their claims for indemnity. In actual
operation the apparent altruism of the mandatory system worked in favor
of the selfish and material interests of the Powers which accepted the
mandates. And the same may be said of the dismemberment of Turkey. It
should not be a matter of surprise, therefore, that the President found
little opposition to the adoption of his theory, or, to be more
accurate, of the Smuts theory, on the part of the European statesmen.

There was one case, however, in which the issuance of a mandate appeared
to have a definite and practical value and to be superior to a direct
transfer of complete sovereignty or of the conditional sovereignty
resulting from the establishment of a protectorate. The case was that of
a territory with or without a national government, which, not being
self-supporting and not sufficiently strong to protect its borders from
aggressive neighbors, or its people sufficiently enlightened to govern
themselves properly, would be a constant source of expense instead of
profit to the Power, which as its protector and tutor became its
overlord. Under such conditions there was more probability of persuading
a nation inspired by humanitarian and altruistic motives to assume the
burden for the common good under the mandatory system than under the old
method of cession or of protectorate. As to nations, however, which
placed national interests first and made selfishness the standard of
international policy it was to be assumed that an appeal under either
system would be ineffective.

The truth of this was very apparent at Paris. In the tentative
distribution of mandates among the Powers, which took